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Sartre

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The suicide of Allende on 11 September 1973 during the U.S.-backed coup marked the end not only of democracy in Chile for almost two decades but the defeat of a people who did not realize until it was too late that they had never really been united. A people united will never be defeated, Ortega proclaims. Yet the perversity of the democratic state is that it does everything in its power to fight the unity of a people, despite the contradictions, which can no longer be disguised, between its form and the expression of a popular will. The fundamental problem of democracy is not that the state should fail to serve the popular will but, rather, that in its absence the state becomes its surrogate in representation.

Sartre once called elections a “trap for fools”. Contrary to the ideology of liberalism, voting is a fundamentally anti-democratic act precisely to the extent that the extant electoral procedures and mechanisms preserve the contradiction between the equality of every vote (“one person, one vote”) and the fact that not every vote is counted. The only solution to the antinomy between democracy – according to which, in principle, every vote is counted-as-one – and capitalism – according to which a vote is a measure of one’s power – is to reject both options as strict contraries: every democratic institution is, as Rancière argues, predicated on an ineradicable wrong (tort) that cannot be corrected by the proper procedures (e.g., we just need re-districting or better controls) because it is the act of voting itself that produces the “miscount” and, thus, the illusion of a popular will that could be expressed by a numerical tally “for” or “against”. The problem, in short, is not how to count the votes “fairly” but the operation of the count itself.

“[E]verything is quite clear if one thinks it over and reaches the conclusion that indirect democracy is a hoax. Ostensibly, the elected Assembly is the one which reflects public opinion most faithfully. But there is only one sort of public opinion, and it is serial. The imbecility of the mass media, the government pronouncements, the biased or incomplete reporting in the newspapers – all this comes to seek us out in our serial solitude and load us down with wooden ideas, formed out of what we think others will think. … So when we are called to vote, I, the Other, have my head stuffed with petrified ideas which the press or television has piled up there. They are serial ideas which are expressed through my vote, but they are not my ideas. The institutions of bourgeois democracy have split me apart: there is me and there are all the Others they tell me I am (a Frenchman, a soldier, a worker, a taxpayer, a citizen, and so on).” (Sartre)

In the face of the present plutocracy, we are no longer deluded by the ideology of liberalism, which has resulted in the present legitimation crisis: “… serial thinking is born in me, thinking which is not my own thinking but that of the Other which I am and also that of all the Others. It must be called the thinking of powerlessness, because I produce it to the degree that I am Other, an enemy of myself and of the Others, and to the degree that I carry the Other everywhere with me” (Sartre). The complaint that the state no longer “represents me” has not taken the necessary step: we are promised a supposed solution (in the form of “adequate representation”) that is exactly the problem that needs to be overcome. Democracy requires not the representation but the expression of a popular will, i.e., the will of a people.

The reduction of the political subject to the economic (or, in Sartre’s terms, the practico-inert) seems now to be total. There is neither a people nor even the hope for one.

Dean has recently argued that the necessary intermediary for a people-to-come is the party, which “operates as the support for the subject of communism [or we might simply say, of politics] by holding open the gap between the people and their setting in capitalism. The more the gap appears, the more the need for and perhaps even sense of a party impresses itself. This gap isn’t a void. It’s a knot of processes that organize the persistence of the unrealized in a set of structural effects: ideal ego, ego ideal, superego, subject supposed to know and believe – the party as the Other space. … [It is] a rupture within the people dividing them from the givenness of their setting, a rupture that is an effect of their collectivity, the way their belonging works back upon them”. The party manages the affective antagonisms – between us as well as between us and the objective conditions in which we live – that are otherwise either serialized and abstracted into the liberal citizen or mobilized by identity politics to maintain the necessity of the former. The party is the site where politics happens as the embodied, material body of the collective (what Hobbes had thought the sovereign could be) that can pass through the state without constituting it. Thus the only democratic politics that can resist the temptations of fascism is disruptive of the state and its power by the voice of a people united, without which there is only the crowd and its frenzy.

A century before Hilbert, in his Beiträge, Bolzano proposed with astonishing prescience the autonomy of mathematics from transcendental philosophy. In a few brief, lucid paragraphs, Bolzano proposes a simple criticism of the Kantian project: not all objects that appear (to us) must have a form but only those that appear as external. Couple this observation with his definition of mathematics as the “science which deals with the general laws (forms) to which things must conform [sich richten nach] in their existence” and mathematics is effectively inoculated from the grounding mechanisms of transcendental philosophy from Kant to Heidegger.

In one sense, then, it should not be surprising that around 1961 the man who made Hilbert’s program so problematic should declare that there is something fundamentally correct about Kantian philosophy: i.e., that the construction of new mathematical theorems that cannot be derived from a finite number of axioms requires new intuitions. Yet Gödel avers here not to a Kantian notion of intuition—which he admits is unclear at best and, as Bolzano had already noted, simply false for a large part of mathematics outside geometry—but to Husserl and claims that in phenomenology philosophy for the first time meets the desiderata established by Kant. That is what should be surprising since the gulf between Kantian and Husserlian intuition seems too wide for the easy leap Gödel wishes to make.

Perhaps the missing link may in fact be Bolzano. Objects of perceptual experience, Bolzano claims, must have a form but also—unlike, for example, mathematical objects—sensible matter (as he says, something which “occupies [erfüllt] this form). Instead of the usual word “matter”, however, Bolzano asserts that these are also a priori forms (as space and time are for Kant), “except that the range to which the former relate is narrower than that of the latter, just as the form of space has a narrower range than that of time”. We are here well on the way to Husserlian hylomorphism; yet the later genetic phenomenology abandons the constitution of sense hylomorphically. As Henry has shown, for example, and as Husserl himself declares in the lectures on active and passive syntheses, hyle is ejected from its status as the blind content of the real into the life of the monad within which “a unitary nature and a world in general is constituted genetically … according to a constant process of attestation” (Husserl). Is this not the pathos of truth and the impossible ethical problem explored by Sartre insofar as, in his language, the “essence” of the for-itself is nothing other than relatedness (relation to itself, to being, and to others as three aspects of the same transcendental structure)?